According to a recent study completed by Leapfrog Group, a healthcare benefits consortium, and Childbirth Connection, a non-profit maternity care organization, in some hospitals in the United States, nearly two in five babies are born before 39 weeks of gestation through the means of elective Cesarean section. The study examined data on elective early deliveries that hospitals across the nation provided voluntarily.

The results were startlingly, but varied from community to community, and even from hospital delivery ward to hospital delivery ward. For example, in Ohio, rates of early delivery ranged from nearly 32 percent at a hospital in Cleveland to .3 percent at another hospital in Cleveland. Many Ohio hospitals declined to report data, however.

The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog quoted the Leapfrog Group's CEO who stated that the report's results may be "disturbing" to some, but that at least the hospitals that participated are open to transparency. Leapfrog and Childbirth Connection are aiming to bring down the rate of early elective deliveries to five percent. The reason: they estimate that early deliveries are costing the U.S. healthcare system $1 billion dollars annually. Other advocacy groups advocate that hospitals that continue to allow early elective deliveries without a medical reason may be bordering on hospital neglience.

Behind these numbers are real risks to newborns and mothers: babies delivered earlier than 39 weeks faces higher risks that they must be placed on a ventilator, with its attendant risks, as well as stays in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) due to complications from delivery before the newborn is fully capable of surviving on its own. Mothers who are induced before labor begins face a much higher rate of c-section and use of epidurals - both c-sections and epidurals have risks of infection, fever, use of instruments for vaginal delivery and other complications.

Source: Wall Street Journal Health Blog, "Too Many Babies Being Delivered Early for No Good Reason: Report," 1/26/11